RX 24 - Connecting Processes With Connections - Catie Pershing

Transcribed Content

Hello. Hi, guys. Our next session in here is connecting processes with connections for people centered processes. Please welcome Katie Pershing from Woodman. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for joining me after lunch. I'm really excited to be here with you. Like I was introduced, my name is Katie. I'm from Woodman Valley Chapel in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So we're at the base of Pikes Peak, which we try really hard not to take for granted. It's very beautiful. We have been around for forty four, forty five years. In 1979, our first pastor traded his red sports car for 14 acres and a chinchilla hut, which is where our church started. We've now grown to five campuses, so four in the local Colorado Springs area and then one in a prison a little south of our city. We have been on Rock since 2016. So it'll be eight years in November, and we are still learning stuff every day. We do not have it all figured out. We are not Rock experts. We are not SQL experts, and we're definitely not Lava experts. And we get a lot of help from Rock partners and from our friends in the community. And even eight years in, there are days where it feels like we just have no idea what we're doing. So if that's how you feel, solidarity, we're all in it together. This is my family. I've been married for almost fifteen years. I have two redheaded boys. On Thursday, my youngest is starting second grade and my oldest starts eighth grade. He'll be 14 shortly, so seven and 14. I have been personally attending Woodman since 2010, and I've been on staff since 2015. I originally started as the assistant to and partner of our executive pastor. I helped launch a campus, and that really comes in handy knowing what things are like from the ministry side and to kind of be on the ground with doing ministry every day. Throughout all of that, I worked part time in 18, I took over as IT director. So I oversee our ROC team and then our traditional IT team as well. Our IT and our ROC teams, we really see our role as shepherds to the flock of staffs. We kind of see our staff as our flock. And our goal is to equip our staff, to equip the saints for the work of ministry. We very much operate in the fact that we're all different parts of the body, and we're all gifted differently, and we want to empower our staff to use their gifting while we're, at the same time, able to use ours to serve the kingdom. So two years ago, I joined our strategic lead team, which has been a really fun opportunity. I have the opportunity to speak into technology and digital strategy at Woodman as a whole, kind of beyond the traditional sphere of IT. So I think that's been really valuable for our church as well. So why are we here talking about Connections today? They've been around forever, right? A long time. As long as I can remember in our eight years of Rock, they've been there. I want you to know that Connections is something that's kind of new to us personally. So like I said, we don't have it all figured out. We're learning new stuff every day. But in the last year, we've really rediscovered and started utilizing Connections. And it's been exciting to learn more and to dig into them and see how they can change our processes. In the last year, we've moved thousands of people through connection requests with minimal troubleshooting and effort on our team's part. And more or less, we're using core functionality. Not a whole lot has been customized. And so that's why we're here, because I think connections are undervalued and that they can be really powerful. Also, it's really possible that we're just really late to the party and just now are getting on board with all of this. I want to do this a little bit testimony style. So I'm going to tell you what life was like before connections and then tell you and show you what life was like after connections. So life before connections. As I mentioned, we still don't have it all figured out. But in all of the time that we've been using Connections up until about a year ago, it's been really rough. We only use Connections because we needed it for a sign up plug in, which was a great plug in, but it really just kind of served as a pass through. It was more of a burden than it was a blessing. And a couple of years ago, we worked on building out our ministry partner processing. Ministry partners are what we call our volunteers. And they have a pretty complex process to get people serving in kids and students. So this first graphic on the left side shows our attempt to build out that process and create and bring visibility to that process, which was great. But it wasn't quite what we were looking for. We still struggled with it. Then on the other side, we used a couple recipes to build out those bubbles that change colors as activities are added, which is also really cool, but it still felt like stuff was missing, like we were missing the visibility into those processes. And unless our staff was 100% confident in how everything worked, often there were issues with things being done or missing, we created more work for our teams than help, and relationship opportunities and connections with people were constantly falling through the cracks. In a church our size, we're doing what we can to make sure that people in our community feel known and valued, and so we really just felt like the tool was not doing what we needed it to do. And so a couple of years ago, we kind of jumped ship and jumped over to workflows and tried to use workflows for everything. And I think workflows are great. I've done entire sessions on how much I love workflows, and they're one of my favorite things in Rock. But building workflows forced us to work with our teams and ministries to define those processes and to look at who does what and when. But for our staff, it was still really difficult. We struggled with the grids. They can be hard to read. For nontechnical staff, you can't hide columns. Takes a lot of training to teach someone how to use a workflow. Too many workflow types leads to too many workflows running every time your process workflows job runs. And if you don't set your advanced settings or you leave logging on, you can bloat your log file, and that causes really big problems. Ask me how I know from experience. Workflows can be prone to errors. Something goes wrong, they're pretty difficult to fix. You have to go talk to a technical team member, a rock team member, to get things back on track. And not only that, what happens when a staff member leaves? They leave with 100 workflows assigned to them. Who gets the privilege of going through and reassigning all those open workflows? Always falls to our team. So workflows are great, and they have their role and their purpose in Rock. But we were still struggling to provide visibility in the process that we were creating. And it still felt like we were missing, and there just had to be a better way. So when I had the opportunity to take a step back and kind of go back up to 40,000 feet and look at this at a more strategic perspective, I realized the root cause was that connections alone and workflows were allowing people to fall through the cracks. But why? And I think it boils down to a lack of visibility plus a lack of accountability plus a lack of flexibility equals missed relationship opportunities. Trying to use connections alone and workflows alone wasn't working, And we were missing out on valuable opportunities for ministry and relationship. So what changed? Rock grows, needs change, tools are expanded, and functionality changes. And in the last few years, the core team has come out with some really amazing tools in the connection sphere. So we're going to talk about those today. For us specifically, the big thing that came out were the connections board, and that's the Kanban style board. We really love that. They also rolled out in 2020. They rallied and rolled out connection campaigns, which is how you can create lots of different connection requests and get those assigned really quickly. And for us, oddly, connection request attributes and the ability to see them in grids and to see them on cards was a game changer for us as well. So on top of that, we also started thinking a little bit more strategically about how we use our processes and how our staff members use them, and that's why we're here. So connections, I think they can become the backbone for processes and even for processes that your staff interact with, but people in your congregation as well. I'm hoping to show you why. So the engagement manual, if anybody's read that, describes connection tools as the backbone that allows you to build advanced processes. And while I 100 agree with that, I'd like to rephrase it to read, connections provides the backbone that allows you to build people first processes. Processes. So the entire functionality of Connections is based on moving a person through a set of statuses and states, and it naturally puts people at the center of the process. You're moving people, not just requests, not just a workflow. You're moving people through processes. And so I think in the beginning, when you read through the documentation, it focuses a lot on the idea of involvement and getting people signed up to serve. And I think there's a lot of applications beyond signing someone up to serve. So we now use Connections as a tool to assist our staff in walking a person from a defined start point to a defined end point along a relatively linear path. And I say relatively linear because it helps to lay out a linear path, but we know that it's flexible enough where people can jump around as they need to. One thing we don't do with connections is try to build fully automated processes, and that's because we as a church, we place a high value on relationship, and even in the smallest processes, we want to be intentional connecting with people and coming alongside them and walking them through a process versus handing them an email and saying, here you go. We want to be part of that process with them because that's the start of a relationship oftentimes. And while I think there's a time and a place for full automation, we've really focused on creating and equipping our staff with tools that help them come alongside people. So I have two case studies for you today, and I want to take a look at how we're using these tools to connect with people and move them. It's all going be fairly high level, but I am more than happy to chat with you guys. Look me up on Rocket Chat. Happy to jump on a Zoom call and walk through any of the really technical details. So please feel free to reach out. I really enjoy chatting with churches and handing off resources and code and exporting workflows for people too. So for the last year, our entire staff has been working through what we call one another. Essentially, set out to be really intentional about meeting face to face with as many people in our congregation and community as possible. So we've literally moved thousands of people through connection requests as part of this goal and this intentionality. It's actually kind of become a verb at our church among staff. We'll often hear people saying, oh, I'm going to one another with someone, or hey, I'm going to go one another. It's just become part of our culture, which has been really cool. But how are we supporting that? Other than a few dynamic data blocks for reporting, we are using connections to manage the entire process. It's about 120 staff members and a couple several thousand people going through this process. A year ago, did a session on this, and we were just jumping into it. And I'm really happy to report that after a year of using it, it's gone really well. We have staff asking for similar processes so that they can visualize the people that they want to reach out to, And they're not just keeping a notebook full of names or sticky notes or emails or text messages and trying to compile that information. It's created a place for them to do that. And so we have staff asking for that beyond our intentionality with one another. So let's go ahead and jump into how this is all set up. Process to set it up was really simple. So we're using the connections board and encouraging staff to participate in the process by manually moving the cards through four simple statuses. So this is one connection type, one connection opportunity, about 15 connection attributes, and most of those are because we're tracking things that were discussed during the conversation topics, and seven workflows. And that's it. And that's really all there is to moving all of these people through our process. So here's a snapshot from my actual board. These are all requests that are assigned to me. Yes, I have a handful in my meeting completed column that I really do need to go close out. But this is what my connection board looks like on any given day. So those four statuses, no initial contact, contacted, meeting scheduled, and meeting completed, that's all core. So we just define those statuses in the core settings. The layout of the connection boards, as we've talked about, is core. And we're really focusing on the use of states to keep our data clean. So active, meaning the connection request is still in process connected, meaning it was a successful connection, we were actually able to meet face to face with that person inactive means you tried, but you weren't able to meet with them for whatever reason and then future follow-up, which is core, and it allows you to schedule a date to be reminded of that follow-up, and it returns back to an active state. So let's zoom in a little more and look a little deeper. All of our connection request attributes are core. We added quite a few, but we're using standard field types. The activities to keep track of interactions with each person and the assignments to a staff member using connectors, all built in. We set it up within a day, probably, and then spent our time on reporting. So really easy to set up. Let's talk about workflows. All of them are added with core workflow triggers. And we made the decision to hide the Edit button. So if you're familiar, you'll notice that's missing. We went ahead and hid that. And we use workflows to help update those requests because we just felt like it would lower the likelihood of someone doing something crazy and editing things that they shouldn't be editing. So those workflows make sure that our data stays clean and people move through the process as intended. And overall, like I said, it's gone really well. The actual workflow on my team, let's talk about that on our Rock team. Once we got everybody out and trained and started, we have one person on staff who goes through and clears out their requests to remove once or twice a week, pretty minimal. And we have other random one off questions. But most of the time, our questions are solved by teaching people how to use the filters. Like, why am I still seeing old requests? Well, if you would filter out inactive, you wouldn't see your old requests. That's probably three out of four questions that we answer is how to come alongside our staff and show them how to use the filters. So we are continuing this in the next ministry year, and we really don't have to do a whole lot. It's kind of just up and running and ready for next year. So this year, we're going to continue to look at a few processes, and I'm going to highlight our second case study. But this year, as a staff, we're continuing being intentional and focusing on one on one connections. But as part of that, we're working towards what we call step in, step up, step out. So this is an intentional focus on encouraging our congregation to step into community, to step up into leadership, or to step out into ministry in our city within their own spheres of influence. And so as part of that, we moved our sign up to serve process from workflows to connections. We had it in workflows. We were using workflows to track whether or not people had connected. And our team is trying to work towards a greater level of consistency amongst our ministries and campuses. And so that's why we're moving it into connections. Now, we all know in Rock we could build a workflow for everything. We could build a workflow that sends a confirmation email with links to fill out the background check and all of the required trainings. But yet again, we're working towards those relationships, and so that's why we chose Connections. So really, the first step of any involvement process starts with letting people know about the opportunities that are available. Can't sign up if they don't know how they can serve. So I want to highlight one more part of the core functionality that is available for your website. I'm going grab these screenshots from the demo site because we actually want a different direction for our website for this, but we'll discuss that in a moment. With the core blocks, you have the ability to display the opportunities for people to view and search. All of the blocks utilize a Lava template, so they're very customizable. And most of the time, you can drop it right into your theme, it'll look pretty decent. The connection opportunity search Lava block that's this here. The block name's on the bottom in case you need to look it up. That allows you to search for connection requests, and it's specifically your connection opportunities, specifically tied to your setup in the back end. The search options can be customized, so it provides a lot of flexibility for your congregants to figure out where they want to serve, what would be good for their gifting, and for their availability. When you combine the connection opportunity search LAVA block with the connection opportunity detail LAVA block, you can provide more information on a specific opportunity and then provide them with a link to sign up to serve. So to allow people to sign up to serve, all you need is a page with the connection opportunity sign up block. And with those three blocks, you've effectively created a way for congregants and attendants to search for and view opportunities, which automatically creates a reconnection request. And if you've set up your default connectors, it automatically assigns to that person. Pretty automatic, pretty easy to set up. Throw in a quick workflow to notify your connector, and you're ready to go. So now I think the core blocks are great, but for a couple reasons, we decided to use content channels for our listing of opportunities. Allows us to categorize by ministry and use parent child relationships in the content channels. And since we're not using search functionality, this was just more flexible for us and a better way to display our information. Eventually, we're hoping to use personalization, so we're planning ahead for that to be able to personalize and provide the right opportunity at the right time for people. Additionally, we use a workflow instead of the sign up block because we have additional questions that we wanted to ask. We wanted to know how long they've been attending that specific campus. We wanted to know how else they're serving, and that's harder to customize in the sign up block. It also just allowed for a little more flexibility in formatting for us as well. And so here's what the end result looks like for staff inside Rock. So now when someone signs up to serve, it automatically creates the request. And from there, connections takes over. Default connectors set, and they receive an email notifying them that they have a new request. It also provides a link to jump right there so they can get right to that request immediately. And it just makes it a little easier for them to jump in and see all of their opportunities at once. So you can see that we've set up a few different statuses to visualize where the potential ministry partners are in the process. And we've trained our staff to use the filters to get down to just their requests within their connection opportunity. But they can also swap back and forth. So for our campus coordinators who are working with campus pastors, they can jump in and see all of the requests for their campus and filter down to see their own requests as needed. We are allowing editing in this instance, and we're allowing staff to transfer back and forth, so just using the core functionality to help them reassign to the correct opportunity and connector as needed. So zooming in onto the request, we've added some quality of life improvements, hoping to make things easier and a little more fun for our staff. The badges, which they're relatively familiar with from the person profile, these are all related to opportunities for serving. And so our staff know what they mean. If you hover over them, it tells you exactly what they mean. Another thing I really love are the tabs for connection attributes. That didn't used to exist. It used to just be a really long list of attributes that were often in a really random order. And so being able to organize those into categories has been really helpful for our staff too. We've organized the workflows to only show on specific statuses, which was also not an original feature. So now we can show our Add to Serving Team button only when they're in the Ready to Serve column, for example, which is really helpful for staff. It helps clarify when and where they should use certain workflows. So the goal really for us is to provide staff with the information they need without ever having to navigate away from this request. The one thing we did do we didn't hide the edit and we didn't hide the transfer, but we did hide the add request button because we wanted to be able to control a little bit more information. So we hid that button, added the gold yellow button up in the top corner, and that's essentially an internal version of the workflow that allows staff to enter in those requests, automatically sets all of the attributes, and then automatically emails the default connector. So that's one of the things we did customize, but you wouldn't have to. You could use the add request button. Now if we go back to that main view, there's one column here that you may have spotted that I wanted to dive into a little bit more, and that's this additional steps needed. So every ministry opportunity is different Different processes to get started serving in kids, to being a community group leader, to serving in students all have a different set of requirements. Right? I'm sure you guys run into that problem too. We have two main processes: commissioning, which is where we go through our commissioning journal, and then we commission an individual to be a leader within our church. And background checks are relatively universal depending on the ministry, but most ministries do some form of that. And so we've added this additional steps needed column to help staff identify who actually has additional requirements before they can serve. So when you think about a background check, this is where it gets a little interesting. A lot of these additional steps have their own set of sub steps that have to be completed for a background check to be considered finished. Have to send the background check. It has to go to protect my ministry. The results have to come back. There's a lot of sub steps that have to be done within that process. And so we've of affectionately or maybe it's just me come to call these zoom in processes, where we can allow our staff to have an overall view of the individuals moving through their sign up to serve process. But then they can zoom in and look at the actual background check process to see where their individuals are in that process. So essentially, you start these zoom in processes from an existing connection request. So when it's in the additional steps needed column, you'll have two additional workflows to send the background check request or start the commission leader process. And when you click those buttons, it generates a new connection request in a different connection type and links them together. And so it stores a link and generates a button to the new connection request under the Zoom In Process tab on the main connection request. And then retroactively, we generate a link for the zoom out process on the newly created connection request. And so they can jump back and forth and go, Okay, this person needs a background check. I'm going to zoom in to where they are in the background check so that I can see what needs to happen or where they are in that process. So it allows them to track the main process but still have visibility into that subprocess. So on this slide, for example, you'll see my test child. I have two boys of course, it's a girl who was onboarded for a ministry role but needed a background check. I started the Zoom in process, and a second request was generated. Her original request still exists, but staff can choose to just view background checks, or they can zoom back out to the main process. And while we're on background checks, we're with Protect My Ministry, and we've noticed in the last couple of years that we get a lot of questions about, hey, I sent somebody a background check request. Did they actually fill it out? Has it gone to Protect My Ministry? Where is it? Maybe it's just us, but we get a lot of questions about where people are in that process. So we're putting it in connection requests. And as they work through the background check workflow, we added a couple of actions to that workflow to update the status, and the cards move through the workflow as they complete specific actions. So this really will help our staff be able to see, Okay, I'm waiting for this person to fill out their background check form. So I can send them a follow-up and ask that send them another link and ask them to do it again instead of having to email the HR director and ask her if she's gotten it or ask where it is. This allows them to find those answers on their own and resend the background checks if they need to. The one thing that's really cool about this is at the end, when it gets to the result received and it's approved, is that it will retroactively go back and update the original referring process or the zoom out process so they'll know that the background check was completed. So a couple of lessons that we've learned. These are really, really small things, but I think that they are kind of great quality of life improvements that will help your staff. Use color. So we've started using color, and hopefully will continue using color, to help indicate if and when action is needed. So purple indicates that staff member has an action to take. Green means that that's the end of the process and they completed it successfully. Red means that that's the end of the process and for some reason it wasn't completed successfully. It allows us to add a little bit of automation where if it's in the green column, we can mark it as connected and the card disappears. If it's in the red column, we mark it as inactive and the card disappears. We're also naming statuses with actionable verbiage. So instead of just saying commissioning journal, we're saying deliver commissioning journal, because that's a call to action to our staff that, hey, I have to take that action. That's me. That's my responsibility. Statuses can only be defined on connection types, so it is the top level versus connection opportunities. So don't be afraid to use pages to help organize things for your team. So our residency has four different main processes that they're using, but they're all different connection types because they all have different statuses. And so we added a sub page that allows them to click on the process they need and then added tabs along the top so that he can navigate between his processes more seamlessly. So it makes it feel like a seamless, cohesive unit versus 15 different connection types. Focus on your filters. Train your staff on how to use the filters. And if somebody is seeing something that they shouldn't or not seeing something that they should, it's probably their filters. I think after we've gone a year through this, we've gotten to almost everybody, and everybody pretty much understands to check the filters. But that seems to be the biggest question we get is, why am I still seeing people that I've already met with? Go filter out. You're connected. So help them understand the power of filters. And the last piece of advice I have is to evaluate automation carefully. I think my team would agree with me that I would love to automate as much as possible, but I also understand and really believe that relationships are important. And so trying to be intentional about when and where you automate is one piece of advice that I have for you. The more you automate, the more complex your system is, the more opportunities to lose people through your processes, and less flexibility for your staff member to move people in a way that suits them. Processes are made for people and not people or people are made for processes. Processes are for people. Just focus on the people. So final words. As we've developed our strategy for interacting with processes and how we as an organization approach these processes, these are some of our key things that we're trying to do. We're trying to focus on people over processes. The people matter in the processes, not the process. And because of that, we want a tool that prioritizes flexibility over complexity, because one size really does not fit all. Even our staff approach the same process differently. And because of that, our staff members utilize them differently. That necessitates the need for visibility, which brings accountability. So by creating that visibility in the process and allowing visibility of the people in the process, accountability naturally follows. It's just a benefit of visibility that there's accountability. And following up with someone is no longer hidden in emails or text messages or in someone's head or a sticky note that's stuck to the bottom of their desk. Now it's all in one place, And that really means that we're not going to lose people through these processes and that we can be intentional about building relationships with our staff and making sure that people aren't left behind and that we're focusing one to another and encouraging each person. Questions?